Palestinian Gaonate

The Land of Israel Gaonate (Hebrew: ישיבת ארץ ישראל‎, romanized: Yeshivat Eretz Israel) was the chief talmudical academy and central legalistic body of the Jewish community in Palestine during the middle of the ninth century, or even earlier, till its demise during the 11th-century. During its existence, it competed with the Babylonian Gaonate for the support of the growing diasporic communities. The Egyptian and German Jews particularly regarded the Palestinian geonim as their spiritual leaders. The history of the gaonate was revealed in documents discovered in the Cairo genizah in 1896. Sparse information is available on the Palestinian geonim prior to the middle of the ninth century. The extant material consists essentially of a list in Seder Olam Zuta relating all the geonim to Mar Zutra.

In the middle of the ninth century, the Palestinian academy was transferred from Tiberias to Jerusalem. It was forced to move to Tyre, Lebanon in 1071; authority was later transferred to Fostat, Egypt. The Academy of Palestine had probably ceased to exist before Palestine was conquered by the Christians, but the tradition of the Palestinian gaonate seems to have survived at Damascus, for Benjamin of Tudela (c. 1170) says that the teachers of Damascus were considered as the "scholastic heads of the Land of Israel."